by Kate Long
Gemma was cooler. Her mum was French, which gave her an edge straight away. She was smarter at handling the booze, she went out most nights and she dressed sharper than me and Roz. She spoke less, was more reserved. It had been a surprise when she and Walshy got together. ‘Chalk and cheese,’ said Roz to me privately. ‘I just don’t get it.’ I’d said, ‘I suppose they’re both nice-looking.’ And Roz had rolled her eyes as if to suggest she was glad she wasn’t afflicted by physical beauty. She said, ‘It won’t last. He collects women.’ She didn’t seem to notice how quiet I went after that.
So there was another reason for getting out of the house this morning. I knew the girls were at lectures, and it made me twitchy when it was just him and me on our own.
I reached for my backpack, squinting against the sunlight, and unhooked my jacket from the chair. But as I did so, one of the shoulders caught and the chair toppled over with a massive crash. ‘Fuck,’ I said.
‘Chaz? Is that you?’
Too late, he’d heard me. ‘Yeah. I’m going out.’
‘Just come and have a look at this.’
‘I’m in a hurry,’ I lied.
‘Won’t take a minute. You’ll be impressed.’
I drew in a long breath and stepped out onto the landing. From there, a sharp chemical smell hit me. ‘Jesus, Walshy. What the hell?’
‘Come and see.’
The door of his room was wide open. I looked in and saw that he was kneeling by the open window, painting the sill a violent acid green.
‘God’s sake,’ I said, stepping through the door. ‘What have you been doing?’
‘Shaving a poodle.’
‘Oh, you’re killing me.’
He was wearing his University of Central Yorkshire T-shirt with its You See Why (UCY) slogan. We’d all bought one during Fresher’s Week, before we realised they were naffer than naff and only fit for covering your nakedness when everything else was in the wash.
I said, ‘If you carry on with that, you won’t get your deposit back.’
‘Yeah, that landlord, he’s a bastard.’
‘Seriously, though, what? That colour’s vandalism in a tin. What’s it called? Burnt Retina?’
‘This is home improvement, this is.’ He propped the brush across the pot and stood up to survey his progress. ‘The paint was all flaking off before.’
‘Did you strip the wood before you started? Or even sand it? Tell me you at least wiped the dead flies away.’
He flashed a roguish smile. ‘It’s created a nice textured effect.’
I watched him overload the brush, gloop paint in a pool onto the windowsill, then try and persuade it evenly over the lumps and ridges. In places it was so thick I knew it would take weeks to harden. Bristles were detaching themselves at every stroke. At least he’d thought to rest the pot on a magazine.
I sat down on the end of the bed. ‘You know, if you’d been after some home improvement, you could simply have cleared the floor.’
Next to the rucked-up duvet a drawer of socks lay tipped on its side. There was a scattering of pens over the carpet as if someone had emptied them there deliberately. A beanie hat was lodged across his bedside lampshade. Unpaired footwear lay distributed at odd intervals, like a children’s picture puzzle: How many trainers can you spot hidden around the room? The more I looked, in fact, the more I could see out of place. There were bright squares in the dust on top of the table where objects had been recently removed, a desk tidy slung underneath a chair, empty hooks on the wall. ‘It’s a bit chaotic today, even by your standards. Has Gemma been having a clear-out?’
‘You could say that.’
‘Meaning?’
‘She’s moved back to her old room. We’ve broken up.’
I stared at him. ‘No. When? Why?’
‘Last night. Late, late last night. Morning.’
‘My God.’
‘Don’t look so worried, Chaz.’
‘It wasn’t—’
‘—anything to do with you. Or me, actually.’
‘You sure?’
‘Uh huh.’ He glanced up. ‘She reckons she’s gay.’
‘Eh?’
‘Woke up one morning, found she was a dyke.’
‘Don’t use that word. It’s horrible.’
‘She used it herself.’
My head was reeling. ‘Is this a wind-up, Walshy? Because if it is, it’s in really poor taste.’
All the time he never stopped his painting, the brush sweeping backwards and forwards through the ugly-bright mess. ‘Go ask her. If it is a wind-up, it’s hers.’
I thought, No, even you wouldn’t set up a joke like that. He must be telling the truth. ‘Blimey. So is there someone else? A girl, I mean.’
‘Dunno. There’s no need to get stressed over it, though. Me and her, we’re not going to turn into the housemates from hell, throwing plates and screaming down the stairs at each other. We’ll just go back to how we were when she first moved in – you know, friends. It was probably time we wound it up anyway.’
‘And have I to tell Roz?’
‘’S’up to you. Fuck, I’ve dripped on the curtain. Pass us that towel, will you?’ He frowned at the curtain hem, spat on it, then scrubbed vigorously. ‘I suppose you’ll be saying I should have taken these down before I started.’
‘It makes no odds now. You need proper paint-remover on that. Have you any white spirit?’
‘Is that like absinthe?’
‘No.’
‘Oh. Can we not just stick it in the washing-machine?’
‘I wouldn’t have thought so. It’s gloss you’re using, isn’t it? Not emulsion.’
‘Search me. I asked for a tin of paint, that’s all I know. The guy in the shop never said.’
I went over to his desk and grabbed the chair, dragged it across to the window.
‘What you doing, Chaz?’
‘Saving your curtains.’ I stepped carefully up till my head was level with the rail. ‘If Gemma or Roz have any nail-varnish remover, we might be OK. So long as we act fast.’
‘Not Roz. She bites her nails to stumps.’
‘Gemma, then. Look, can you at least take hold of the hem end for me, stop it falling in the paint?’
One by one the plastic hooks clicked off neatly under my fingers. When I glanced down, however, I saw that in stretching across, he’d managed somehow to press the other curtain up against the wet paint. ‘Ah,’ he said when I pointed.
‘It’s on your jeans too. Stay where you are and I’ll unclip that side while I’m up here.’ My arms were aching and I was desperate not to mark my own clothes. ‘Just watch you don’t knock that tin. Oh, shit. Too late. Right, stand still and don’t step off that magazine. Don’t! Yes, it’s on your shoe as well. But if you stay on the paper you’ll save the carpet.’
He stood quietly with his head bowed while I finished and climbed down. The curtains I balled up, paint smudges tucked away inside, and thrust against his chest. Then I knelt, the way I do to help Will with his shoes, and eased Walshy’s feet out of his trainers; guided him off the island of magazines and made him sit on the bed and remove his T-shirt. ‘You’ll need to take your jeans off too. We’ll stick them all in a hot wash together after we’ve had a go with the varnish remover. No promises, but it’s worth a try.’
I could feel his eyes on me throughout. Eventually he said, ‘You always know how to fix everything. You’re like our mum, the House Mum.’
His pale bare shoulders gleamed under the electric light.
‘Get stripped,’ I said. ‘I’ll see you down in the kitchen.’
The morning began with body parts in the garden and ended with a dead neighbour.
It was Will who spotted the debris. There were tiny plastic limbs strewn across our back lawn, a 9-inch propeller lodged in the flowering currant. He came running to me with a fistful of pieces he’d gathered. ‘Little man broken,’ he said, which was a pretty accurate assessment.
Together we h
unted down the rest and brought them inside to reassemble. It helped that I knew what I was making. Old Mr Cottle’s lumberjack windmill has been poking up over the top of our back fence for at least two years. The structure sits on a pole, like a bird-table, and with every passing breeze the blades rotate and the miniature man bends forward and mimes a chopping action. Pointless as well as ugly, not to mention way too light and flimsy for the job. Three times now the lumberjack’s ended up on our side, blown from his moorings Wizard of Oz-style. Sometimes he arrives intact, sometimes he’s been blasted apart. My impulse today was just to bin the bloody thing, put him out of his windy misery.
I didn’t owe Tommy Cottle anything, either. He wasn’t a nice man. Never one of these grandfatherly types who handed out sweets and smiles and liked to pass the time of day. If he spoke at all it would usually be to moan about Will being noisy. In the last eighteen months he’d tipped grass clippings down the gap behind our currant bushes, phoned the council to say we were breeding rats under the shed, and prised a fence panel apart to help his bag-of-bones cat use our flowerbed as a toilet. Not so much a character as an old git. Once he even made the front page of the local paper for trying to nick crocus bulbs from round the War Memorial.
So basically he’s been a crap neighbour from the moment he arrived, and no court in the land would have convicted me if one night I’d set his lumberjack on fire and danced round the flames cheering. But I knew he’d been in hospital again recently and that nobody had visited him – he told me that himself, as if he’d been expecting me to trot up there with a bag of fruit and a copy of the Racing Times – and overall my feeling’s been I’ve enough on my plate without encouraging a war in my own back yard.
For this reason Will and I took the trouble to snap the plastic lumberjack into working order, spent a fun time testing him out, then put on our coats and trooped round the corner to Mr Cottle’s front door.
There was no reply to our ringing or knocking, but the car was in the drive and I could see his mobility scooter parked in the hall behind the bevelled glass. Given he can’t walk to the end of the street these days unaided, I guessed he must be inside. I opened the letterbox and shouted his name.
‘Watch, Grandma,’ said Will, running down the metal disability ramp with thumping, clanging strides.
‘Shh,’ I told him.
All I could hear from inside was the muffled sound of the TV.
‘Let’s try round the back,’ I said, laying the lumberjack on the gravel next to the ramp and taking my grandson’s hand. I had a sudden prickle about what we might find, and though I’d rather Will had stayed outside, he was just too young to be left unsupervised.
At the rear of the house the garden was neat, wheeliebins labelled, planters and tubs emptied ready for spring. Will poked at the cat-flap and I tried the door handle. It gave, and we were in. The kitchen smelled of toast overlaid with menthol and chemical toilet; in the sink sat a milk pan half-full of water, but aside from that the room was fairly tidy. A clutch of money-saving coupons was bulldog-clipped to a Bonnie Scotland wall calendar, pots of Brylcreem were stacked into a tower, his mugs hung symmetrically from a wooden rack. Even his pan scourer was tucked into the mouth of a china frog sitting on the windowsill.
‘Here, play with this,’ I said, picking up the frog and handing it to Will. Needs must as the devil drives.
I could see across the hall into the lounge. On the TV screen, a blonde presenter was helping a middle-aged woman step onto some weighing scales. The top of Mr C’s head showed over the back of an armchair. I led Will into the hall, closed the kitchen door behind us, set him to feed his frog on the floor. Then I made myself walk into the room.
Tommy Cottle was sitting upright with his eyes open, and for a split second I thought he was OK. I’d been a fool crashing in, over-dramatic. Words of apology formed on my lips. But the next second I knew.
‘Mr Cottle?’ I said hopelessly. A quick glance at Will to check he was occupied, then I leaned forward and pressed the old man’s shoulder. ‘Mr Cottle? Tommy?’ There was no response. His face was perfectly peaceful.
‘OK, Grandma has to make a phone call, we need to go,’ I said. I stepped backwards and, though I was trying to be careful, my leg caught against a small table with a mug of coffee on top. The mug slid off and bounced onto the floor, sloshing beige liquid across the beige carpet.
Will looked up, only mildly interested. ‘Frog’s hungry. Yum yum.’
I knew it wasn’t the time to be worrying about stains, but I couldn’t stop myself picking up the mug and placing it back on the table. The action made me shiver and almost drop the mug again: the china was still very slightly warm. However Mr Cottle had died, it had been both recent and quick.
I stood in Gemma’s doorway and scanned her room. Huge black and white poster of Jean Harlow over her bed, tumble of shoes under the window, clutch of Aldi carrier bags dumped on her dressing-table. The wardrobe was open a crack and I could see clothes spilling out from the bottom. I had this sudden picture of her scooping her belongings together and making trip after trip up and down the stairs while Walsh sat by and watched. Gemma staggering in here, dropping things, rooting through them, throwing armfuls into the cupboard, not bothering with hangers or folded piles and then trying to jam the door closed, swearing, leaving it. My mum’s like that. She believes inanimate objects are in league against her.
I made my way between the piles of Gemma’s history books and poked around the dressing-table. One of the plastic bags I could see straight away was full of make-up, so I had a rummage and brought up two bottles of nail polish. The second bag was all hair products, and the next, Ventolin inhalers, painkillers, eczema cream, tampons. Finally, at the bottom of the fourth bag, a pot of varnish-remover pads.
There was no time to waste. I’d run to the kitchen now, scrub the paint-marks, then put the pot back before she came home from lectures.
And yet I stayed a few moments, staring at Jean Harlow and trying to work out what I felt. Gemma gay and Walshy free. Us all together, in the same house.
Just thinking about it made my head spin.
After the ambulance men had been and gone, the niece turned up. She was what Mum would have called hard-faced. Older than me, bone-thin, dyed black hair. ‘You’re the one who found him?’ she asked.
‘I’d fetched his little chopper.’
She narrowed her eyes. ‘Eh?’
‘He has this . . . thing, plastic, windmill. A man.’ I seemed to have lost the power to construct a sentence. ‘A garden ornament. It blew over. Our fence.’
She was only half-listening, her gaze roving round the room, and I thought, She’s doing an inventory. She’s thinking, What did he leave me in his will? I felt like saying, ‘Sorry, am I in your way?’
‘And he was in this chair?’
‘That’s right.’
‘What’s this mark here?’ She pointed to the carpet. ‘Did he wet himself?’
‘That was me,’ I said.
‘Eh?’
‘I mean, I knocked over a drink. He’d made a drink. Before he died. I don’t mean I made a drink while I was here.’ I haven’t filched anything, you grasping cow.
‘You live over the back?’
‘Yes. With my grandson.’ Will was at the table, good as gold, scribbling over a colouring book. ‘We didn’t see a lot of Mr Cottle. I know he’d had a spell in hospital a while ago.’
‘Creaking gate. It was a shock, though, I thought he’d go on forever.’
‘Well, you do. When my mother died, we knew she was ill, but even so—’
‘Can you take the cat?’
She took me completely off-guard. ‘Cat?’
‘He has a cat.’
‘Oh, yes, I know, but I don’t think—’
‘Otherwise we’ll have to get it put down. Which would be a shame.’
‘Can’t you have it?’
‘Not allowed. I’m allergic.’
Bet you aren’t, I thought.
‘It can’t have that much longer to live. Six months tops, I’d say. It’d be nice for your little lad there, to have a nice pet. You’d like a cat, wouldn’t you, love?’ she called across to Will.
Straight away I should have said, Sorry, I can’t manage that, but shall I look up the vet’s number for you? There was this small window of opportunity where I could have turned my back and not left the house seething at myself, a tatty basket under my arm. ‘What about the RSPCA?’
‘I don’t think it would survive. On its last legs, that one. It’d be cruel to stick it in a pen at this stage.’
‘And Mr Cottle’s got no other family?’ Because who were all these framed photos of? I’d barely registered them till now, but suddenly they were everywhere, the same dark-haired woman over and over. She looked familiar, too. Then the penny dropped. It was Carol Vorderman.
‘No, he had no one. Just me.’
Poor beggar, I heard Mum say. Take his cat. It’s t’least you can do. Don’t you remember our Chalkie? You loved him. He was never any bother.
‘I suppose we could look after it till you find a proper home,’ I heard myself saying.
The deal was done. She relaxed visibly, even allowed herself a slight smile.
I said, ‘I’m sorry about your uncle. My mum died last year and it’s hard, incredibly hard. Adjusting, coming to terms with the fact they’ve finally gone, that you’ll never speak to them again. All the things you meant to say . . .’
The room was hushed. Somewhere a tiny clock was ticking. I searched her face for some flicker of sympathy.
She said, ‘Yeah. Anyway, there’s some tins of Whiskas in the kitchen if you want them. Daft to let them go to waste, isn’t it?’
Walshy wandered into the kitchen just as I clicked the washing-machine door shut. He was wearing a black kimono that barely reached mid-thigh.
I said, ‘I hope you’ve at least put some knickers on under that.’
‘Don’t worry, I’m safe inside my boxers.’ He twitched the kimono aside to demonstrate.
‘Lovely. And the reason you’re still trouserless is . . .’